How to Read Piketty

Any attempt to make any sense out of the furor around the claims made in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century, must first navigate through the maze of blog posts, columnists, political commentators and a plethora of online and offline news media.

If, and only if distribution of wealth is important to a reader, and a desire exists to understand its nuances and make a difference, the level of one’s reading skills will be sorely tested on today’s information highway.

If we use the late Mortimer Jerome Adler’s 4 levels of reading (skimming, inspectional,analytical and comparative) as a yardstick, then the highest level, comparative, will need to be employed in order to make sense out of the criticisms leveled at Thomas Piketty.